A blog by Ken Harrison

Replace Your text Messaging App with Facebook Messenger

I use Facebook Messenger for contacting people who don’t have my phone number, which happens a lot. Since Facebook Messenger handles SMS messages, I’ve been thinking about using it instead of Google Messenger to see if I might like it.

I like that you can group your messages together or separate so you never have to wonder how the contact is being carried out. I also like having one app for both of these tasks, which are very similar. Notifications were smooth, and it even imported my old text messages. If you’re looking to have fewer apps on your phone and you use Facebook Messenger a lot, this may very well be an option, Keep in mind that it wasn’t for me because of three simple issues.

The first thing I missed about Google Messenger was being able to color coat my SMS messages. Facebook Messenger uses purple for text messages, which is fine, but I also want to have a color for every person I’m texting. And if I can’t have that, it would be nice to have the ability to change the SMS color. Purple is fine, but I prefer green.

The second issue was being forced to use the Facebook Emoji. You can use the Emoji for your phone, but it will switch to the Facebook Emoji when a message comes in. I could have lived with this, but not when I can’t change the color scheme for SMS messages.

The third and final problem I had was with a group text from my sister. I have auto download for attachments turned off (I like to conserve data), so when my sister sent an image file to me and my niece, it came through as a text message from her that needed to be downloaded every time she responded. I would click on the download message, then it would switch to the group chat. This happened every time my sister responded in the group chat.

None of these three issues alone would make me switch back to Google Messenger, but together they were a constant reminder of what I was missing. Also, these things will probably be fixed with future updates, but I’m not willing to switch over until they get fixed.